A review of German culture in the English-language media

What’s New

Human Dignity Shall Be Inviolable

Human Dignity Shall Be Inviolable

For this year's Venice Biennale, artist Sung Tieu has clad the German pavilion with a replica of the facade of the now-abandoned Gehrenseestraße complex where she grew up in eastern Berlin—"recreating the grey concrete and smudges of graffiti with three million mosaic stones made in Ravenna."  (Artforum, 5/6/26;  The Guardian,…
Read More
Max Planck, copyright violator?

Max Planck, copyright violator?

The Science of Nature (formerly Naturwissenschaften) retracted two papers from the 1940s by the Nobel Prize–winning physicist—illuminating the hazards of retroactively applying "contemporary standards regarding duplicate publication or self-plagiarism to historical papers." (Science, 6/26/26; Ars Technica, 6/28/26)
Read More
Eine Erklärung durch die Representanten der Vereinigten Staaten von America

Eine Erklärung durch die Representanten der Vereinigten Staaten von America

"Eine Erklärung durch die Representanten der Vereinigten Staaten von America, im General-Congress versammelt": Only days after July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was translated into German—by the publisher Charles Cist!—and printed as a broadside. Two known copies of that first print run survive, now owned by Gettysburg College and…
Read More
“In serenity lies strength”

“In serenity lies strength”

Jérémie Queyras's new portrait of Angela Merkel subtly features "one of the most Merkelesque quotes." It's now on display at the Bode Museum before it heads to Berlin chancellery. (The Guardian, 7/3/26)  
Read More
The pseudonymous soccer fan with the everymensch image

The pseudonymous soccer fan with the everymensch image

Germany's World Cup dreams ended abruptly, taking @FreddyLA7 along with them. The pseudonymous soccer fan with "the everymensch image" gained a viral following by posting "about the beauty of big-box chain stores and gas stations, projecting an infectious enthusiasm for American mass culture."  (The Boston Globe, 6/26/26; Forbes, 6/30/26; The…
Read More
A miniature portrait of Gustav Mahler

A miniature portrait of Gustav Mahler

Robert Seethaler's The Last Movement, translated by Charlotte Collins, is "a miniature portrait of a genius all at sea, both literally and metaphorically"—an ailing Gustav Mahler, on his last transatlantic crossing in 1911.  (The Michigan Daily, 4/10/26; Financial Times, 5/4/26)
Read More

Arts

Human Dignity Shall Be Inviolable

Human Dignity Shall Be Inviolable

For this year's Venice Biennale, artist Sung Tieu has clad the German pavilion with a replica of the facade of the now-abandoned Gehrenseestraße complex where she grew up in eastern Berlin—"recreating the grey concrete and smudges of graffiti with three million mosaic stones made in Ravenna."  (Artforum, 5/6/26;  The Guardian, 5/12/26)
Read More
“In serenity lies strength”

“In serenity lies strength”

Jérémie Queyras's new portrait of Angela Merkel subtly features "one of the most Merkelesque quotes." It's now on display at the Bode Museum before it heads to Berlin chancellery. (The Guardian, 7/3/26)  
Read More
August Sander’s people of the 20th century

August Sander’s people of the 20th century

"Making your way through 'August Sander's People of the 20th Century' at the Yale University Art Gallery is like going through Grand Central Terminal at rush hour; it is crowded with every sort of person there is."  (The Wall Street Journal, 5/16/26; The New Yorker, 5/21/26)
Read More
The Met Neue Galerie

The Met Neue Galerie

The Neue Galerie New York will merge with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its neighbor across Fifth Avenue, in 2028.  The new "Met Neue Galerie" will retain its "jewelbox character" and its most famous work, Klimt's 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I.  (The New York Times, 5/14/26; The Wall Street Journal, 5/19/26)
Read More

A miniature portrait of Gustav Mahler

A miniature portrait of Gustav Mahler

Robert Seethaler's The Last Movement, translated by Charlotte Collins, is "a miniature portrait of a genius all at sea, both literally and metaphorically"—an ailing Gustav Mahler, on his last transatlantic crossing in 1911.  (The Michigan Daily, 4/10/26; Financial Times, 5/4/26)
Read More
“Radioactivity” turns 50

“Radioactivity” turns 50

Kraftwerk's "Radioactivity" turns 50, morphing over the decades "from elegiac melody to club banger and anti-nuclear clarion call." (BBC, 5/12/26)
Read More
German thrash metal

German thrash metal

"What Kreator, Sodom, Destruction and Tankard—the 'big four' of German thrash metal—might have lacked in finesse and professional outlook, they made up for in sheer unbridled aggression."  (The Guardian, 3/18/26)
Read More
Henze’s Raft of the Medusa at Tempelhof airport

Henze’s Raft of the Medusa at Tempelhof airport

The Komische Oper staged Hans Werner Henze's Raft of the Medusa on a giant swimming pool stage in a disused hangar of Berlin's Tempelhof airport—not coincidentally, adjacent to refugee housing since 2015.  (The New York Times, 9/14/23; Financial Times, 9/18/23)
Read More

The RSC’s Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

The RSC’s Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

Mark Gatiss "gives a splendidly skin-crawling performance" as the title gangster in the Royal Shakespeare Company's new staging of Brecht's Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. (The Guardian, 4/22/26; The New York Times, 4/22/26)
Read More
Souffleurs in Germany

Souffleurs in Germany

"The souffleur has all but vanished, except in Germany, where they sit in the front row—or even take to the stage."  (The Guardian, 9/26/23)  
Read More
Tanztheater Wuppertal’s ghosts

Tanztheater Wuppertal’s ghosts

Jennifer Homans attended Tanztheater Wuppertal's performance of "Água," but all she could see were ghosts: "If these young dancers have something to say, they will need their own form, not Pina Bausch's. Her Germany is not their Germany, and dance, like history, is nontransferrable." (The New Yorker, 3/27/23)
Read More
Linie 1 gets a new staging

Linie 1 gets a new staging

Linie 1 gets a new staging and keeps that '80s feeling alive. "The entire three-hour show plays out on west Berlin's U1 underground line, which used to run from glitzy Wittenbergplatz to grotty Schlesisches Tor in the years before the Berlin Wall fell."  (The Guardian, 4/16/23)
Read More

In die Sonne schauen / Sound of Falling

In die Sonne schauen / Sound of Falling

Mascha Schilinski's In die Sonne schauen (Sound of Falling) unspools a haunting family story across four generations of girls, never straying from the setting of one Altmark farmhouse.  (The New Yorker, 11/20/25; NPR, 1/28/26)
Read More
Politics at the 2026 Berlinale

Politics at the 2026 Berlinale

"In Berlin, world events are for ever on the cinema doorstep and keep on spilling inside." İlker Çatak won the Berlinale's Gold Bear for Yellow Letters, a drama about creeping authoritarianism—but as the festival opened, jury president Wim Wenders caused an uproar by stating that filmmakers "have to stay out of politics."  (NPR, 2/21/26; The Guardian, 2/21/26; The Guardian, 2/26/26; The New York Times, 2/27/26)
Read More
Wrack and Ruin

Wrack and Ruin

A new DVD boxset, Wrack and Ruin, gathers five DEFA "rubble films" from the late 1940s, which were once part of a project "to make antifascist commercial blockbusters, in a devastated society that would have preferred to thing about almost anything else."  (The Quietus, 11/22/25)
Read More
Rosa von Praunheim (1942–2025)

Rosa von Praunheim (1942–2025)

In memoriam: Rosa von Praunheim (1942–2025), "a key figure of the New German Cinema movement who made taboo-breaking films about queer life and scandalised the country when he outed German celebrities on live TV."  (The Guardian, 12/17/25; Deutsche Welle, 12/18/25)
Read More

History

Max Planck, copyright violator?

Max Planck, copyright violator?

The Science of Nature (formerly Naturwissenschaften) retracted two papers from the 1940s by the Nobel Prize–winning physicist—illuminating the hazards of retroactively applying "contemporary standards regarding duplicate publication or self-plagiarism to historical papers." (Science, 6/26/26; Ars Technica, 6/28/26)
Read More
Eine Erklärung durch die Representanten der Vereinigten Staaten von America

Eine Erklärung durch die Representanten der Vereinigten Staaten von America

"Eine Erklärung durch die Representanten der Vereinigten Staaten von America, im General-Congress versammelt": Only days after July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was translated into German—by the publisher Charles Cist!—and printed as a broadside. Two known copies of that first print run survive, now owned by Gettysburg College and the Deutsches Historisches Museum.  (The New York Times, 6/26/26; ATA German Language Division, 7/2/26)
Read More
An archive of love letters

An archive of love letters

The University of Koblenz maintains an archive of more than 60,000 love letters, "filled with sweet nothings dating back to the 1700s."  (The Guardian, 6/3/2026)
Read More
Hessy Levinsons Taft (1934–2026)

Hessy Levinsons Taft (1934–2026)

In memoriam: Hessy Levinsons Taft (1934–2026). She was celebrated as "the ideal Aryan baby" on the cover of Sonne ins Haus, "a distinction complicated by the fact that she was Jewish and had been exploited as part of a dangerous hoax." She later moved to the US and became an accomplished chemist.  (The New York Times, 1/9/26)
Read More

Books & Ideas

Max Planck, copyright violator?

Max Planck, copyright violator?

The Science of Nature (formerly Naturwissenschaften) retracted two papers from the 1940s by the Nobel Prize–winning physicist—illuminating the hazards of retroactively applying "contemporary standards regarding duplicate publication or self-plagiarism to historical papers." (Science, 6/26/26; Ars Technica, 6/28/26)
Read More
A miniature portrait of Gustav Mahler

A miniature portrait of Gustav Mahler

Robert Seethaler's The Last Movement, translated by Charlotte Collins, is "a miniature portrait of a genius all at sea, both literally and metaphorically"—an ailing Gustav Mahler, on his last transatlantic crossing in 1911.  (The Michigan Daily, 4/10/26; Financial Times, 5/4/26)
Read More
When Susan Sontag met Thomas Mann

When Susan Sontag met Thomas Mann

In 1949, Susan Sontag and two high school friends looked up Thomas Mann in the phone book and paid him a visit at his home in Pacific Palisades. Seventy-seven (!) years later, Merrill Rodin returned to the room where it happened. (The New Yorker, 3/14/26)
Read More
Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026)

Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026)

In memoriam: Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026), "philosopher, social theorist and defender of humane Enlightenment values." He helped to transform postwar Germany's, and the world's, public sphere for the better.  (The New York Times, 3/14/26; The Guardian, 3/15/26; Foreign Policy, 3/16/26)
Read More

Et Cetera

The pseudonymous soccer fan with the everymensch image

The pseudonymous soccer fan with the everymensch image

Germany's World Cup dreams ended abruptly, taking @FreddyLA7 along with them. The pseudonymous soccer fan with "the everymensch image" gained a viral following by posting "about the beauty of big-box chain stores and gas stations, projecting an infectious enthusiasm for American mass culture."  (The Boston Globe, 6/26/26; Forbes, 6/30/26; The Atlantic, 7/1/26)  
Read More
What Germany can teach us about birthright citizenship

What Germany can teach us about birthright citizenship

Germany began extending citizenship at birth to an expanded group of immigrants' children in 2000. Research shows that children born after the cutoff integrated better with their peers, had greater academic success, and committed 70 percent fewer crimes. (The New York Times, 6/2/26)
Read More
Merz has achieved something almost mythical

Merz has achieved something almost mythical

"Friedrich Merz has achieved something almost mythical in just under a year as a chancellor: he has united the Germans. East and West, North and South, city and countryside – no trace of polarization. Almost everyone agrees on one thing: they don't like Merz, and that he's somehow impossible as chancellor."  (The Guardian, 5/6/26; The Economist, 5/6/26; Der Spiegel - The German View, 5/9/26)
Read More
No breakup is easy

No breakup is easy

"No breakup is easy, but the bitterness and disillusionment over Trump's disdain for Europe is especially sharp in Germany." (The Washington Post, 1/26/26; EL PAÍS, 1/30/26)
Read More

About me

 

I’m a German-English translator with years of professional experience as a writer, teacher, and historian. To learn more about my work, please visit translatorplease.com.

I started kulturplease.com in 2009, when I was in between careers and craving a little more Kultur in my daily life. My life—and the world at large—has changed a lot since then. But I’m just as enthusiastic about following the latest developments in the German arts and culture, and celebrating the talented people who write about them.

I aspire to keep this site as up-to-date as possible, but sometimes life intervenes. If it looks like I haven’t updated things in awhile, stay tuned! I’ll be back. You can also look for me on Bluesky.

Elizabeth Janik